Foreign Languages and Cultures

The Atlas of Brazilian Digital Literature is the first and the only digital archive of digital literature in Brazil to date. It reunites the documentation (taxonomic description, images, videos, interviews with the authors, and critical fortune) of 150 works and counting. This article reports the challenges related to the construction and maintenance of the Atlas, which led to the formation of the Brazilian Digital Literature Observatory, a research group dedicated to follow and critically analyze the production of Brazilian digital literature, to propose alternatives for its preservation, and to discuss the changes in the literary system at a time when print culture and digital culture coexist.

In 2017 I have published a book (both in English and Portuguese) of essays about literary and cultural circulation, featuring contributions from the two colleagues here on this special issue, professors Helena Buescu and Zang Longxi. They consist of versions in English and Portuguese of essays exploring this topic, both in the form of case studies (analysing works and authors from various literatures and cultures) and discussions of theoretical issues relating to circulation. I am therefore going to give a brief account of a few aspects of importance to literary and cultural circulation, in the context of Comparative Literature, and would ask you to consider my intervention as an invitation to read the essays in those two books. To begin with I would like to clarify that studies of literary and cultural circulation today involve considering at least two things: 1) the transnational capitalist system within which literary works and cultural goods circulate; 2) the various modes of appropriation and transformation in operation in different parts of the world, which to some extent determine the meanings that literary works and cultural goods will have in each one of those places. In terms of the transnational system, it can be said that the current stage of what was termed "globalization" a long time ago has overcome the obstacles of national borders, and has managed to consolidate a kind of hegemonic vision, which establishes and justifies actions undertaken in our everyday lives and is consubstantial with the meanings derived from the systemic order, providing the wider frame of reference which our daily actions are part of. Bearing in mind that, as we know, hegemonies can have the effect of erasing historical meanings that previously existed, meanings that were or still are socially important, I would state that the first major challenge for comparative work, today, is a greater commitment to producing a type of knowledge that goes beyond the naturalization of prevailing meanings, including a historical perspective that allows us to better understand not only our present, but also the choices previously made, which have led us to where we are today. In terms of comparative theoretical work, I borrow my words from Marcel Detienne: "The choices made, consciously and unconsciously, by differing cultures are the comparables with which the comparatist works (Detienne, p. 186)." But what do I mean by this?

This paper is a synthesis of available literature and a review of the positions of studies on Hausa language as national language in Nigeria. The lack of a national language is a major sociolinguistic problem which the nation has been grappling with since independence. More so, as some scholars opine that a national language is a factor in the unity of a country. The paper looks at the multilingual nature of Nigeria of which Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba are the major languages. A large body of literature exist in support of Hausa language which is said to have a largest number of non-native speakers in Nigeria. Of the three major languages, Hausa possesses the corpus requirements for a national language: a developed writing system, rules on grammatical usage and vocabulary which can be expanded to meet linguistic needs as it arises. A synopsis reveals that it is regarded as one of the largest languages spoken in Africa; A lingua franca in Niger Republic, Northern Togo and Northern Ghana. Hausa language has been developed and standardized to take over the role which English is currently playing in all domains in Nigeria.

Nigeria, the most populous country in the expansive continent of Africa, is home to over 230 million people belonging to over 300 different ethnic groups and speaking over 500 different languages. Unity is imperative everywhere, but hard to come by in many countries. Nevertheless, despite Nigeria's vast polyethnicity and multilingualism, unity prevails.

In defining “the global archive,” this essay refers, first of all, to the historical development of exhibitions in Germany that address a global horizon, a distinct cultural project since at least the Enlightenment. After 1945, modern art, which had been removed from public view by the Nazi state, was reintroduced as a project of reeducation as much as aesthetics. Documenta, beginning in 1955, exhibited modern and later artists in the destroyed buildings of the city of Kassel, and expanded its formal and cultural address to a global scale over its fifty-year history. Documenta itself became a kind of continuous archive of its own exhibition history, a mode of formal presentation that increasingly relied on the works it presented. Here I read in detail the archival strategies and form of dOCUMENTA 13, arguably a highpoint of this effort to archive globality as it emerges. Theorists from Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, and Arjun Appadurai to the “critical regionalism” of Cheryl Herr...

Introduction. The consequences of the pandemic have increased public attention to digital online learning
technologies. The latter in the formats of podcasts, forums, streams, wikis, websites and video blogs are actively
distributed and saturate the content of managed education and self-education, are used instrumentally on
educational platforms, and become an independent educational resource. Thanks to the digitalization of
modern education, educational video blogging is developing.
Purpose of the study. This purpose is the author’s interpretation of the ontology of the subject area “Educational
video blogging”, which does not claim to be completely exhaustive of this topic.
Materials and methods. Materials for building a system of concepts were Russian-language and Englishlanguage scientific publications selected in accordance with search queries in Science Direct, ResearchGate,
Google Scholar and e-library.
Results. The results of the study were an ontology that included four levels of analysis. The first is associated
with web 2.0, transforming into web 3.0 and then into web 4.0. Web 2.0 provides digital online technologies
to the educational process, and also creates the basis for the development of video hosting and social
networks. The second level of digital online technologies includes text, visual and mixed formats for presenting
information. Guided education and self-education (the third level of analysis) constitute the educational
process in the online space. In both cases, digital online technologies are involved, which in managed
education are integrated into educational platforms (LMS, SMC, MOOC). The fourth level of analysis focuses
on educational video blogging, which dominates self-education. Educational video blogs vary in terms of
authorship, recipients, and content. Related categories to E-video blogs are video podcasts and websites of
online schools and teachers.
Conclusion. As a result of the study, the basic concepts of the videoblogosphere in general and the
educational video blog in particular were identified, and a system of their interrelations was built. In the
future, the ontology can be expanded by studying different formats for presenting digital material, as well as
concepts related to the digital identity of teachers.

Charles Ball’s 1836 slave narrative is not only an example of an autobiographical narrative of escape from enslavement, it includes narratives of Africans who have been captured and brought to North America. Ball’s narrative records the heterogeneity of Africans arriving—from Muslim West Africans to those from the Congo, a ubiquitous term given more specificity in his narrative. Defining a distinction between an arrivant and someone, like himself, who may be a second generation enslaved person is Ball’s purpose, suggesting he belongs to a new culture. Ball’s descriptions parallel Zora Neale Hurston’s description of Kossola, a record of the last African brought to North America as an enslaved person. Ball’s role recording his encounters parallels that of Hurston as ethnographer and W. E. B. DuBois as a social historian.

C. S. Giscombe’s Giscombe Road and Nikky Finney’s Rice are arguably book-length poems that construct an environmental consciousness through the lens of Black identity. Of importance in each is the use of material culture—maps, encyclopedia entries, schematic illustrations, and photographs—to construct the texts. Finney’s work tends to use photographs as supplements to her work, that is as illustrations which are intended to humanize against the grain of anti-Blackness; however, the materials in Giscombe’s collection are parts of a whole, not supplements, but quoted texts albeit utilizing a different visual modality. While there is a distinction between their use of material culture, Finney and Giscombe nonetheless create ecographies— autobiographies that situate and map oneself in a history of ecologies.

In this essay, I suggest that the study of comparative literature is subject to the same distorting pressures as the study of the Orient. “Comparativism,” as I call it, is like orientalism: both a description and a distortion. Constructing its critique in the process of comparing, it inherits deep foundations of historical, cultural, and geographical prejudgment. As with Said’s orientalism, the cornerstone of this construction is West-Eastern (and North-Southern) paternalism, but it is far from the only building block: other obstacles include predetermined views of genre, medium, and even language. There is little, in fact, that is not grist to the will of Western-educated critics. Eastern comparative methodologies, however, are no more innocent of power struggles than their Western counterparts; for one thing, the structural role of empire is shared by both West and East. Simply replacing one hemisphere with another will hardly recalibrate our critical compasses; wherever we are lo...

This report summarizes two experiments that explored whether the personalization principle mitigates the influence of seductive details in decorative graphics during multimedia instruction about the culture of a language. The results showed that decorative graphics increased learning during personalized instruction (Experiment 1), but impaired learning during impersonal instruction (Experiment 2). These findings add to research literature by showing that the instructional value of decorative graphics in multimedia instruction depends on the verbal-semantic context in which they are embedded. This research demonstrates that they are beneficial in personalized multimedia instruction, but detrimental in impersonal instruction. 摘要:本文旨在研究外语教学中,采用多媒体辅助文化知识学习中, 个性化原则能否对装饰性图像效果进行调和。实验一的研究结果显示 在个性化教学中,装饰性图像能提高教学效果,实验二的研究结果显 示在非个性化教学中,装饰性图像有损教学效果。本文提出在多媒体 辅助教学中,装饰性图像的教学效果依赖于语言的语义场景,装饰性 图像有益于个性化的多媒体教学,但是对非个性化的多媒体教学无益。 本文的研究对文献进行了补充,为教学实践提供了参考依据。

Rape and some other deviant behavioural cases reported in Nigerian universities have sometimes been attributed to the type of clothing worn by the undergraduates. Hence, the influence of modern fashion on dressing pattern of Female Undergraduate Students (FUS) in selected state universities in Ogun State. Socioeconomic characteristics, influence of modern fashion on dressing pattern of female undergraduates and constraints to decent dressing were considered. Multi-stage sampling techniques were employed. Firstly, 67% of the 3 state universities in Ogun state were randomly selected, resulting in two universities. Secondly, two Faculties/Colleges were selected randomly from Olabisi Onabanjo University and in Tai Solarin University of Education. Thirdly, two Departments were randomly selected from each Faculty/College. Lastly, 8% of the total number of students were randomly selected from the Departments. Hence, sample size of 130 FUS was obtained. Findings revealed that most (88.5%) of FUS were single. Majority (80.8%) opined that the mass media advertisement of indecently dressed actresses was a major constraint to decent dressing. Over half (59.2%) of the respondents strongly agreed that modern fashion encourages smartness in dressing. However, the undergraduates strongly agreed that modern fashion propels indecent dressing among FUS (55.4%). Nonetheless, most (83.8%) of the FUS were positively influenced by modern fashion in their dressing pattern. There was no significant difference between the influence of modern fashion on the dressing pattern of FUS in the selected Universities (p=0.230). It was recommended that mass media should endeavour to promote decency in advertisement. Students should be oriented on what entails modesty in dressing.

The Atlas of Brazilian Digital Literature is the first and the only digital archive of digital literature in Brazil to date. It reunites the documentation (taxonomic description, images, videos, interviews with the authors, and critical fortune) of 150 works and counting. This article reports the challenges related to the construction and maintenance of the Atlas, which led to the formation of the Brazilian Digital Literature Observatory, a research group dedicated to follow and critically analyze the production of Brazilian digital literature, to propose alternatives for its preservation, and to discuss the changes in the literary system at a time when print culture and digital culture coexist.

Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent astutely interweaves the search for identity into a romantic love story. This article approaches it using a new identity concept found in Amin Maalouf's work In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (Les identités meurtrières). It investigates the identity dilemma that the female protagonist, Sirine, faces while living in-between her conflicting Arab and American allegiances. It argues that her struggle is amplified by the lack of what Maalouf calls "reciprocity." Sirine finds it too difficult to assimilate into the mainstream Arab culture. Arabs around her do not accept her, and she reacts by upholding her Arab identity. This article maintains that even small acts of reciprocity can reduce her identity dilemma.

La Comunidad Valenciana es una zona geografica en la que oficialmente coexisten dos lenguas, el valenciano y el castellano, y la cual cuenta con un sistema educativo en el que se ensena, prioritariamente, el ingles como lengua extranjera o tercera lengua, y el frances como optativa en la etapa Secundaria, seguida de otras lenguas como el aleman, el chino o el italiano. Ademas, en la configuracion de la sociedad valenciana de las ultimas decadas, en este territorio conviven diferentes lenguas y culturas que conforman una comunidad multilingue y multicultural. En este contexto la ensenanza plurilingue se hace indispensable y se impone una ensenanza adecuada a un escenario en el que un enfoque comunicativo, una metodologia eclectica y las tecnicas mas actuales e innovadora en la ensenanza y el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras son requeridas. De ahi que se experimenten y se utilicen diferentes herramientas que hacen posible y favorecen dicha educacion plurilingue. Los programas de int...

In this interview, Jeffrey Schnapp conceptualizes Digital Humanities, Knowledge Design and Experimental Humanities, seen as innovative frameworks, aimed at propitiating a radically new understanding of the current challenges of the contemporary world. The overwhelming presence of digital media and artificial intelligence is scrutinized by Schnapp in order to produce theory literally at the edge.

While the study of world literature is often seen as escaping the boundaries of eurocentrism-albeit with the need for constant revision and self-critique-a truer overcoming would involve another sort of anthologization, namely, of world theory and criticism. World literature should go beyond being a reified collection of translated texts, to become an exploration and comparison of the different ways of thinking about literature and aesthetics in different parts of the world. Barbara Cassin's Vocabulaire Européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles provides a possible model in this regard. The untranslatability of critical terms from different traditions is generative of new meanings due to the repeated efforts to translate and to compare non-synonymous terms with each other. This essay examines the untranslatability and comparability of several different terms from Asian aesthetic traditions.

The paper examines the effect of foreign fashion on students dressing in Nigerian universities, for being fashionable and remains trending. Fashion expresses personal beauty, style, and glamour with which culture is examined with goodness and change within specific time limit and is constant only for minutes; as a social phenomenon. Although centuries back fashion was an elite thing which, globalization of fashion is fast eroding among non-western cultures such as Africa, especially those of Nigeria. The paper employs both primary and secondary sources of data collection to quarry the nature and effect of foreign fashion on students in Nigerian universities as the targeted population. Relying on the findings of the paper indicates that students preferred foreign fashion to indigenous fashion and the desire to attract the male counterpart, academic grade and favor motivated students to dress in seductive manner that has significant effect on students dressing pattern and conclude that dress code be enforced while dress style should be monitored in congruent with indigenous fashion. This is to reinvigorate the drive to regularly broadcast in institutional media to promote indigenous fashion in Nigerian university system as a way of forestalling this hydra-headed menace invading the holy of holies of the African cultural development and education of the African reality.

In the mid-seventies, Paraguay was two decades into what would ultimately be the second longest dictatorship in its history, second only to the reign of its “founding father,” Doctor José Rodríguez Gaspar de Francia. The regime of Alfredo Stroessner justified its existence and articulated its continued role in Paraguayan politics on a genealogy of national identity that had its supposed roots in the Francia government, Francia’s political ideology and, in fact, in the historical person of Francia himself. In this essay I show how the great Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos’s 1974 novel, I, the Supreme, takes aim at the “kernel of the real” in the Stroessner regime’s political genealogy, using fiction to make evident its anamorphic manipulation of national and nationalist identity. By taking at its word the regime’s historical discourse, I, the Supreme reveals the psychotic logic animating its version of political power.

This paper examines the meaning of dress code and the reason why the dress and dressing are an important aspect of culture. The paper investigated the perception of lecturers’ and students’ on why dress code is a panacea to indecent dressing and cultural breakdown in Nigerian tertiary institutions. In carrying out the study, simple random sampling technique was used to select 300 students and 100 hundred lecturers. A two-point Likert scale was used to collect data on reduction of indecent dressing and promotion of decency and morality among students The findings of the study suggest that introduction of dress code and sanctions on defaulters as introduced in some universities, and pasting of posters and handbills that preach against indecent dressing on the campuses could be good measures to control indecent dressing in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions. DRESS CODE: A PANACEA TO INDECENT DRESSING AND CULTURAL BREAKDOWN IN NIGERIA TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS Esther Omoniyi MOFOLUWAWO and ’To...

German narratives composed immediately after World War II. Different from the then newly-propagated Trümmerliteratur (literature among the ruins) or the literature of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coping with the past), Schmidt's writing condensed and "dehydrated" narrative events, weaving antiquity and his personal experience into one in order to lay bare historical lines of continuity. Relating to Pytheas of Marsilia, to an ethics based on praxis and to modern physics, he undertakes a demanding topography of "hell descents" within which he also put into doubt political and academic demands upon a cultural legacy that was, to him, anything but timeless. The essay explores Schmidt's didactic, innovative use of allegory and other rhetorical devices as tools for understanding long-term consequences of failures of interpretation and forceful restrictions on the play of imagination.

E-learning provides a more suitable learning environment for educators and learners. Hence, the e-learning community has rapidly increased over the years. At present, e-learning environments use several materials to transfer knowledge to learners. Out of various types of materials, instructional videos have become the prominent source of information in popular e-learning environments. Instructional videos in e-learning can be categorised into many types based on the content presentation method. Voice-over slides are popular instructional videos at present. Since the instructional materials are a key component of an e-learning environment, maintaining the required quality of these materials is vital. Using proper pedagogy in instructional materials mainly enhances the quality. There are many pedagogical principles proposed over the years, and these principles address different features of all instructional materials. Therefore, it is necessary to derive the applicable pedagogical principles based on the features available in the instructional video to analyse the pedagogy in an instructional video. The investigation related to this paper aims to derive an approach to analysing and quantifying the pedagogy in slides with voice-over type instructional videos. In this study, a thorough literature review first identified the pedagogical principles applicable to slides with voice-over type instructional videos. Next, the prominence of the identified pedagogical principles was derived from a Likert-scale survey conducted by several Information Technology undergraduates. The survey response assigned a rank to each identified pedagogical principle. The rank was derived by the mean score obtained for each pedagogical principle. Next, one-way ANOVA tests were performed for the mean score of pedagogical principles to derive their prominence levels. The ANOVA tests were conducted by adding adjacent pedagogical principles with a non-identical rank until the ANOVA results claimed a significant difference in variances. A new level was defined when the ANOVA results showed a significant difference. This study proposed a pedagogical score calculation formula using these levels (derived from the statistical analysis) to derive a qualitative measure of the use of pedagogy in slides with voice-over type instructional videos. The pedagogical evaluators and content developers can use the proposed scoring method to quantify and compare the pedagogy in slides with voice-over instructional videos.

This essay analyzes the phenomenon of clandestine graves of missing persons in Mexico as a social, political, and philosophical problem, where theological clues are established. With the contributions of decolonial thought this reflection seeks to think the absence and, within it, to think the emergence of an alternative world promoted by the just people of history with the resistances they create to live the present with dignity and hope.

In this essay I will use the expression New Worldism to refer to a particular representation of the New World, developed in Europe. I will take some theories related to this expression (theories of lack and acclimatization) to provide a short introduction to them, taking into special consideration their connection to comparatism as it was developed in 19th-century Brazil.

This article attempts to give an overview of the fashion and dress cultures on Nigerian campuses. Through clothing, we see the various ways in which institutions and individuals engage with “tradition” and with an imagined professional future. The clothing rules on campuses also reveal the extent to which women are held responsible for sexual misconduct there. I show how the debates around clothing have been part of Nigerian universities since their founding.

This essay was inspired by the death and devastation related to the pandemic of Covid-19 which intensified the ways that preexisting sociopolitical contradictions affected black people. Before the pandemic it was commonplace for thinkers to describe themselves as radicals. However, in the moment of crisis, their voices were often silent or they offered superficial commentaries. And the magnitude of their limitations—conflating moral protestations with political analyses, for instance—evoked memories of perceptive thinkers that I knew as a young man, such as visual artist Doug Redd whose worldview and aesthetics exemplify our need for alternative sensibilities, perspectives, and centers of thought in African American culture.

This essay seeks to articulate a detailed reading through two anatomical selections – the mouth and tongue—in Brazilian art from the end of the 1960s. The reading is part of a shift in the matrix of Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” originally published in the Revista de Antropofagia in 1928, whose interpretations spread in Brazil during the second half of the 20th century. This study mobilises elements of the manifesto and its resonance in the works of artists such as Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Pape, Paulo Bruscky, and Lenora de Barros.

The study investigated educational foundations and counseling student’s perception and social implications of indecent dressing among Adeyemi College of Education Students in Ondo State as a case study. Three research questions were formulated to guide the study. Survey design was adopted for the study. Simple random sampling technique was adopted in selecting one hundred (100) Adeyemi College of Education students as participants of the study. The instrument used in obtaining information for the study was a questionnaire. The data collected were analyzed using frequency count, percentage, mean and standard deviation. The result of the study revealed that indecent dressing has impact on students in higher institution. Having established the usefulness and relevance of students dressing in a normal way, the researcher recommended among other things; that parental care, government intervention and other viable means should be applied in curbing indecent dressing.

This report summarizes two experiments that explored whether the personalization principle mitigates the influence of seductive details in decorative graphics during multimedia instruction about the culture of a language. The results showed that decorative graphics increased learning during personalized instruction (Experiment 1), but impaired learning during impersonal instruction (Experiment 2). These findings add to research literature by showing that the instructional value of decorative graphics in multimedia instruction depends on the verbal-semantic context in which they are embedded. This research demonstrates that they are beneficial in personalized multimedia instruction, but detrimental in impersonal instruction. 摘要:本文旨在研究外语教学中,采用多媒体辅助文化知识学习中, 个性化原则能否对装饰性图像效果进行调和。实验一的研究结果显示 在个性化教学中,装饰性图像能提高教学效果,实验二的研究结果显 示在非个性化教学中,装饰性图像有损教学效果。本文提出在多媒体 辅助教学中,装饰性图像的教学效果依赖于语言的语义场景,装饰性 图像有益于个性化的多媒体教学,但是对非个性化的多媒体教学无益。 本文的研究对文献进行了补充,为教学实践提供了参考依据。

Multimedia content is increasingly being used in the context of e-learning. In the absence of classroom-like active interventions by instructors, multimedia-based learning leads to disengagement and shorter attention spans. In this paper, we present a framework for using audio cues interspersed with the content to improve student engagement and learning outcomes. The proposed framework is based on insights from cognitive theory of multimedia learning, modeling of working memory and successful use of audio in the film industry. On a set of 20 freshmen engineering students, we demonstrate that the systematic use of audio cues led to 37.6 % relative improvement in learning outcome and 44 % relative improvement in long-term retention. Post-study interviews establish that the associated students improved recall and engagement to the presence of audio cues.

This research work examines the influence of home movies on the dressing pattern of students of tertiary institutions. The researcher employed simple random sampling to select 152 students from Taraba State University, Jalingo which formed the sample size. Questionnaire and interview were used as the instruments for data collection. Data gathered were presented using tables while frequency counts and simple percentages were used for analysis and interpretation. The research work among many things reveals that virtually all the respondents' watches television and they do so very often. The study also revealed that youths imitate the hip hop/hippies and makeup/hairstyles projected in home movies than any other form of dressing and the major reasons for that are for fashion and imitating a role model as the study postulates such act makes them look indecent on campus. Reversing this issue, the study recommends that media and film regulatory bodies must continue to be vigilant in screening contents of home movies so as to ensure the preservation of Nigerian/ African cultural values both in the content and costume of these home movies.

In this article, on the basis of the analysis of didactic potentialities of three kinds of distance learning technologies (case technology, Internet technology, TV technology), the feasibility of integrating case and Internet technologies to design an "electronic case" as a means of students' self-studying in e-learning of foreign languages and cultures is substantiated. The content of educational, monitoring, motivating and informative functions of the "electronic case" in self-studying is defined. The constituent features of the "electronic case" are described. The structure examples of the "electronic case" and its content for developing business letter writing and reading skills are given. To create an "electronic case" a course management system Moodle should be used as its educational potential enables implementation of the suggested requirements for its designing.

The Atlas of Brazilian Digital Literature is the first and the only digital archive of digital literature in Brazil to date. It reunites the documentation (taxonomic description, images, videos, interviews with the authors, and critical fortune) of 150 works and counting. This article reports the challenges related to the construction and maintenance of the Atlas, which led to the formation of the Brazilian Digital Literature Observatory, a research group dedicated to follow and critically analyze the production of Brazilian digital literature, to propose alternatives for its preservation, and to discuss the changes in the literary system at a time when print culture and digital culture coexist.

Teaching foreign cultures requires thorough analysis and research, for example by focusing on the needs and interests of foreign language learners. The aim of the presentation is to explore selected topics related to foreign cultures that may: (1) arouse the interest of foreign language learners; (2) help the learners develop cultural competence and foreign language knowledge; and (3) assist teachers in selecting appropriate methods for teaching a foreign culture. A theoretical analysis was conducted and compared with the results of a study involving 150 individuals learning Polish at proficiency levels B2-C2 in selected universities in Poland offering Polish language courses. The survey findings revealed that sports and the natural environment were the least interesting topics to the learners, while subjects such as the state and society, everyday life, science and work garnered the highest interest. The results regarding the preferred ways of teaching a foreign culture may be considered as concerning for the development of learners' productive language skills. The majority of respondents expressed a preference for traditional lecture-style instruction regarding foreign cultures, rather than actively seeking information independently, or engaging in discussions with classmates. The findings may be an inspiration for specialists in language education in creating curricula for teaching foreign culture and foreign language taught in the cultural context. Additionally, foreign language teachers can benefit from these results when designing their own teaching/learning materials.

Within the vast body of scholarship on the Enlightenment, only a small portion addresses the role of China in the debates of that period. Among those, scarcely any concerns the relationship between China and Rousseau’s thought. Yet the connections are many, and deep. This essay surveys a body of Chinese political theory available to Rousseau, then compares Rousseau’s understanding of sovereignty, the “people,” popular will, public opinion, and the authority of office, with comparable terms present in the Chinese theory available to him. The aim of this exercise is not so much to establish influence, though that can be difficult to deny. Primarily, the essay attempts to show that Rousseau’s system generates contradictions in part because he attempts to combine parliamentary procedure with the conception of sovereignty and the popular will found in his Chinese sources.

The anthropocosmic vector of modern Pedagogy and Linguistics requires development of such tools for future translators that enable as quick as possible processing of huge amounts of information with production of automatically determined frequencies, on the one hand. On the other hand, it demands minimization of the subjective influence of an individual researcher on the received results, giving a chance for detecting and analysing linguistic phenomena unnoticed earlier. Linguistic corpora are a state-of-the-art technology that can solve the outlined problem perfectly, for it opens a broad variety of practical and theoretical research options, and at the same time it is a didactic tool fulfilling purely didactic, cognitive, informative, formative, and testing / checking functions. Therefore, the use of linguistic corpora technology can be considered from two perspectives – learning to use corpora to translate and learning to translate using corpora. Corpora technology employment can...

En el marco de un proyecto de investigación centrado en la percepción de la realidad multilingüe y la educación plurilingüe que reciben alumnos de distintos niveles educativos, tomamos como punto de partida las autobiografías lingüísticas escritas por un grupo de alumnos de 2º de Magisterio de la Universidad de Valencia. Los relatos recogidos son historias de vida lingüística donde los futuros maestros reflexionan sobre las lenguas que conocen y sobre el que ha sido su proceso de aprendizaje. Un análisis de estos textos nos aproxima a la percepción que tienen estos estudiantes, que se están formando para afrontar los retos de una enseñanza plurilingüe, sobre el proceso de adquisición de lenguas y sobre diversos aspectos de la realidad sociolingüística valenciana, con un sistema educativo bilingüe (valenciano-castellano) oficial desde 1983 (LUEV). Los textos expresan actitudes lingüísticas de diverso signo y concepciones, muchas veces equívocas, sobre la relación entre los conceptos ...

This essay was inspired by the death and devastation related to the pandemic of Covid-19 which intensified the ways that preexisting sociopolitical contradictions affected black people. Before the pandemic it was commonplace for thinkers to describe themselves as radicals. However, in the moment of crisis, their voices were often silent or they offered superficial commentaries. And the magnitude of their limitations—conflating moral protestations with political analyses, for instance—evoked memories of perceptive thinkers that I knew as a young man, such as visual artist Doug Redd whose worldview and aesthetics exemplify our need for alternative sensibilities, perspectives, and centers of thought in African American culture.

Charles Ball’s 1836 slave narrative is not only an example of an autobiographical narrative of escape from enslavement, it includes narratives of Africans who have been captured and brought to North America. Ball’s narrative records the heterogeneity of Africans arriving—from Muslim West Africans to those from the Congo, a ubiquitous term given more specificity in his narrative. Defining a distinction between an arrivant and someone, like himself, who may be a second generation enslaved person is Ball’s purpose, suggesting he belongs to a new culture. Ball’s descriptions parallel Zora Neale Hurston’s description of Kossola, a record of the last African brought to North America as an enslaved person. Ball’s role recording his encounters parallels that of Hurston as ethnographer and W. E. B. DuBois as a social historian.

In order to achieve the objectives of transparency and accountability, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has offered a press conference every morning since he took office. This situation seemed to be a transcendental change in the field of democratic dynamics and political communication in Mexico; however, not merely a means of communication, these conferences have instead become a method of government. Using postulates of Mimetic Theory, this essay analyzes AMLO’s conferences, showing how this daily practice has become propaganda for the regime.

The article addresses the expediency of creating and maintaining information-educational environment at higher educational institutions. The views of scholars on the definition of the “information- educational environment of higher educational institutions” are analyzed. The information-educational environment of Khmelnytskyi National University is described and the peculiarities of the future foreign language teachers training in the conditions of the information-educational environment of higher educational institutions are revealed. It is proved that the information-educational environment has considerable potential for improving the quality of education of the future foreign language teachers. It promotes students’ awareness of the specifics of their future professional activities, develops personal and professional qualities necessary for their future career; gives the possibility to construct individual educational paths and develop students’ creative abilities. A model of the...

The new context of changes in labour-market requirements calls for development of foreign language communication competence and use of technologies that promote professional life-long learning. Individual characteristics necessary for a professional to integrate into the international socio-cultural environment have recently been challenged particularly because of growing demands to the ability to communicate, be autonomous and responsible for the achieved learning outcomes. A switch of the European higher education content to the competence-based learning contributes to the development of the mentioned characteristics and competence. Further, the National Qualifications Framework of Ukraine (7 Level, Second cycle (Master)) envisages mastering foreign language communicative competence in professional activities. This research addresses the issue of ICT tools application in the development of foreign language communicative competence of law students during individual study. We focus ...

Like the other “new modernisms” Afro-Modernism does not exist beyond its role as a critical catchword. The readings given to African-American texts of the modernist period have been subjected to reductive treatments that have overlooked many factors. In this paper I will examine an unacknowledged feature of modernist works that radically changes the understanding of many important texts. One assumption of the critics of literary modernism is that individualism is a touchstone of the movement. One sign of the inapplicability of individuality to American modernism is the occurrence of esoteric group composition. The esoteric does not come into consideration by the literary critics who have established Afro-Modernism, so it is not within the scope of those investigations that challenges to individuality have been considered.

Teaching French in Nigeria can help mitigate the communication barrier between Nigeria and its French-speaking neighbors. However, acquiring French and translating from English into French can present challenges to Bachelor students in Nigerian universities. This paper examines the context of teaching French studies and translation in Nigeria using the National Universities Commission Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards (NUC-BMAS) for undergraduates in the country, as well as other relevant documentary sources. Results show that French is taught at all levels of education and that translation has always been an integral part of the curriculum. Translation is not only taught to increase proficiency in French; it is a separate competence that can orient graduates towards self-employment. Further research is needed to ascertain exactly how translation is taught and how Bachelor students in Nigerian universities are translating into French.

Every new global era demands a rethinking of the roles of the lecturer, especially with the widespread introduction of mixed and e-learning in high schools/universities. From a historical point of view, the new socio-economic conditions of life alter the requirements imposed on the roles, which leads to the emergence of new ones and their modification, and this process is observed especially well in the professional roles of the socio-occupation professions, such as the profession of the teacher. The conceptual framework of the research outlines the roles of the teacher to create a supportive environment in the e-learning environment. The professional role requires mastering and maintenance in a sustainable state of special professional knowledge, skills, and competencies. This implies various mutable rights and obligations, which once again leads to the conclusion that the new roles of teachers are necessary to create a supportive environment in e-learning. The aim of the research ...

This research work was carried out to assess the influence of female university undergraduate" moral standard on dress code implementation in NorthWest Nigeria. The objective of this research is to examine the influence of female undergraduates" age, marital status, moral value and sexual morality on dress code implementation. The study was conducted using descriptive survey design with the target population of seventeen thousand, one hundred and sixteen (17,116) female undergraduates. A sample size of three hundred and seventy-five (375) was obtained. The instrument used for data collection was questionnaire. Demographic information was analyzed using frequencies and percentages. Four research questions were analyzed using means and standard deviations. Regression analysis was employed in testing the four null hypothesis at 0.5 alpha level of significant. Findings revealed that dress code implementation in universities in NorthWest Nigeria has significant influence on female undergraduates" age, marital status, moral value and sexual morality. Hence the four null hypotheses were rejected. Based on the findings, the researcher recommended among other things that university authorities should intensify awareness campaign on the importance of abiding by the stipulated dress code. In addition, booklet containing rules and regulation guiding dress code should be made available to all students.

Nigeria is a highly multiethnic and multilingual African country that speaks over 500 indigenous languages and two official languages, English and French, some of which are taught and learned at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education. This descriptive study has attempted to discuss the state of language education and related issues in the education sector, involving the mother tongue, English, French and Arabic languages. The paper elucidates a few omissions in the National Policy on Education (NPE) and other factors that militate against effective implementation of the language curriculum such as negative perception, inadequate teaching staff and instructional resources, falling students' enrolment and performance, year abroad challenges, lack of funds and controversies generated by debates on a good lingua franca, etc. Based on the findings and their implications for achieving the objectives of the NPE, some recommendations have also been made for a way forwar...

Nigeria is a highly multiethnic and multilingual African country that speaks over 500 indigenous languages and two official languages, English and French, some of which are taught and learned at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education. This descriptive study has attempted to discuss the state of language education and related issues in the education sector, involving the mother tongue, English, French and Arabic languages. The paper elucidates a few omissions in the National Policy on Education (NPE) and other factors that militate against effective implementation of the language curriculum such as negative perception, inadequate teaching staff and instructional resources, falling students' enrolment and performance, year abroad challenges, lack of funds and controversies generated by debates on a good lingua franca, etc. Based on the findings and their implications for achieving the objectives of the NPE, some recommendations have also been made for a way forwar...

The purpose of the study is to examine the effect of appropriately designed multimedia software for both conversational and formal styles with respect to various variables. The model of nonequivalent control group was used in the study. While the group studying with the multimedia material in formal style included 22 students, the other group studying in the conversational style included 23 students. The data collection tools used in the study involved an achievement test, the cognitive load scale for both groups and a questionnaire about the students’ views of the style used in the personalized group. As a result, a significant difference was found between the cognitive load scores of the students in the personalized group and those of the students in the non-personalized group. However, no significant difference was found between the background knowledge levels of the personalized and non-personalized groups and their posttest achievement scores. In the study, the learners who wer...